Alternatives
by zenith020388
Summary: Grace Augustine's Avatar program amazed the scientific community and won the contract for Pandora. And the other competitors who were fighing for that contract? Well...
1. Chapter 1

**Alternatives**

**Chapter 1: Ascension**

Twenty million a kilo, unrefined. It turns out, that is just how much a thousand human lives are worth.

When they discovered the unobtanium on Pandora, and made first contact with the natives, a huge bidding war was started over the rights to travel to the far off moon and both study and negotiate with these strange, sentient aliens. And, if not for Grace Augustine's Avatar Program, my life might not have been so uselessly squandered.

Sorry, it kinda sounds stupid to say that, after all that has happened…

Let me start at the beginning.

My name is Mia. And I was made by the lowest bidder.

With the race to create the quickest, easiest and most effective way to operate on Pandora in full swing, hundreds of companies were exploring thousands of different technologies. Some were trying to downsize AMP suits into something more akin to powered football padding, while others were attempting to perfect active camouflage.

The company responsible for me was one of the frontrunners in the race. They were a genetics company, one that had, previously, dealt in the growth and repair of organs, limbs, and other such necessary gibblets. And they decided to reach for something that many would consider far beyond their grasp.

The Avatar Program did something incredible, building remote controlled bodies by splicing human and Na'vi DNA. The Ascension Program, however, did almost exactly the opposite.

You have to understand, with the globalization of humanity finally coming to a close, certain ethical boundaries have become extremely flexible, particularly in the area of human experimentation.

I guess you see where this is all going.

Don't feel bad. It gets better. Not for a while, but it does get better.

The Ascension Project forcibly infused live humans with Na'vi DNA. Effectively, they tried to mutate their subjects into Avatars.

Permanently.

It took them ten suites of experiments to get it right. Ten sets of a hundred subjects.

Seven subjects survived.

I woke up on a lab table, blinded by bright white lights and surrounded by monitors and people talking excitedly. They were wearing exopacks, which meant they couldn't breathe the atmosphere in the room. Part of my brain identified that fact, and though I had been breathing just fine up to that point of realization, I panicked.

The monitors spiked, and a loud beeping started to blare. The voices started shouting, and I felt my hearts start pounding even faster in my chest.

Wait… Hearts?

Startled out of my panic by the incredibly alien double thumping in my chest, my eyes managed to finally adjust to the light and I was able to focus on a face above me. She was rather plain looking, but the expression of joy on her face was strangely calming. Her lips were moving slowly, and the sounds I was hearing started to make sense suddenly.

"-eed you to sit up for me, Mia. Can you do that?"

And suddenly, I could feel my body.

And I realized just how wrong I felt.

It's difficult to describe the sensation of waking up in a body that was not the one you fell asleep in. especially one with a tail, that's almost twice as large as it had been.

I guess I'll give you the rundown here, though I didn't really have time to go over my new body for a number of hours and one more life-changing decision.

I was almost eight feet tall, a huge change from my previous four-ten. I clearly wasn't entirely Na'vi, but there was no way you could call me human any more. My hair had gone stark black, and the characteristic nerve bundle hung down from the base of my enlarged skull. My eyes had taken on a sharp yellow-green hue, a stark contrast to the deep blue-violet of my new skin. Something in the process had clearly not gone to plan, but evidently much more of it had. The feline-esque nose and ears. The full foot of neck. The long, wiry limbs.

I would be a freak in both groups. But again, that is a later issue.

I'm not entirely sure exactly what went on in those first few hours after the procedure. It was all kind of a blur. I'm sure they were giving me drugs of some kind, but, as I said, I was disoriented enough at the time that it was destabilizing enough being awake, let alone flying high on chems.

The next thing I was definitely aware of was the next time I woke up. The monitors were still there, but the people had left. There was a folder on the side table that gave me a better idea of what had been done to me, and a pouch filled with some kind of paste they obviously expected me to eat. It was left behind as I leafed through the files, devouring the information inside.

They had used a redundancy system in my suite. I was one of the very few who survived. To see on the page what had been done… Redundant heart. Enhanced lungs. Extra kidneys and liver. Increased muscle density. Artificially reinforced bone structure.

A walking medical miracle.

A freak of nature.

There are… A large number of boring details and cold, depressed nights that I'd rather skip here. They started teaching me a bit of the Na'vi language, but there were no major occurrences for a month or so.

The RDA went with the Avatar Program.

That was all I heard before the liquidation teams entered my room. And I did what I needed to do. I regret killing those four men, but they were going to kill me. I was a loose end in a project that was not going to be continued.

You know how these things go.

Interesting side note, it turns out that Na'vi physiology includes a natural air filter. So while it wasn't entirely good for me, I was able to breathe, though somewhat laboriously, Earth's atmosphere.

Which was good, as I had to run through it to stay alive.

The second half of the project was a faster form of transport to get us to Pandora. A way to get the first batch of us to our target. I was saved by an idiot who put that information in thee folder they'd given me that first day. Little did they know that I would not be liquidated like the others.

And luckily for me, it had been completed and stocked for a whole month before the contract was cancelled.

Guess where this is going yet?

You don't dream in cryo. You aren't even aware of the passage of time, really. So I woke up scared and alone, just as I had gone down just over six years before. But when I woke in the tube and the autopilot opened up for me, it registered in moments that I was safe, and that I was definitely not in the Sol system anymore.

I didn't need to hear the computer's automated landing warning to let me know where I was.

Pandora.

* * *

a/n: another day, another story. Pandora is too cool a place to pass up. The idea for this story, in case it wasn't clear, was to explore some of the other possible solutions to the Na'vi problem that were considered alongside the Avatar Program, or at least one in particular. I feel like this intro is a bit of a cop-out, but I think it gets what I want across. Besides, have you seen the extended beginning to the movie? It *SPOILER* ruins a big part of the reveal that Jake's crippled. I don't want give away too much here… R&R, like usual. Stay frosty. –E. Red


	2. Chapter 2

**Alternatives**

**Chapter 2: Descent**

Pandora.

Landing on the forest moon was a terrifying experience. The shuttle came down in the mountains, the heavy magnetic fields messing up the guidance system's telemetry and throwing me off the intended course, sending the thing spinning into the darkness under the trees of the jungle.

I must have hit my head on something, because when I came to, the world swam in an orgy of light and colour, and everything hurt. And I mean everything. My muscles were bruised and sore, my bones felt stiff, and my head throbbed like the air at a rave.

Lights flickered around me, and sparks burst from a ruptured panel to one side of the cryo chamber, but what equipment, survival or otherwise, had mostly remained bolted to the walls and such, though one of the footlockers had evidently exploded, a spray of tools and spare parts littering the cockpit as I stumbled into it.

I stared out the front viewport, taking in my first ever sight of the strange, alien forest. There were plants EVERYWHERE. It was so strange seeing such abundant foliage. Back on Earth, they only existed in zoos, and nature preserves, sealed off like relics of times past. But here, they grew wild and free.

The sight took my breath away.

Most of the ship's systems had been knocked offline, including main power and life support, which was the first clue I had that the ship was open to the air of the moon's surface. Otherwise, I might have suffocated by that time. And sure enough, I was right.

Miraculously, the superstructure of the shuttle was mostly intact, but one of the exterior hatches had been shorn off during the fall through the canopy, along with both wings and a chunk of the aft quarter panel. One of the auxiliary fuel tanks had ruptured, spilling some of the precious fluid out onto the ground, where a clear line of it still smouldered, evidently having burned itself out during my little blackout.

There was a clear path torn through the massive treetops, and several bits of metal gleamed in the sun from the trail of destruction, but as I stepped out into the humid, open air, I could do nothing but close my eyes and revel in the sensation of actual sunlight on my skin. Earth had been shrouded in smog for fifty years before I was ever born, so to feel the radiant warmth on my skin was something of a wonder to me.

Colour, natural and delicious assaulted my eyes as they opened, and I drank in the natural wonder that surrounded me. A dozen different kinds of flowers were within eyeshot, and that was just in one direction. Moss covered tree trunks disappeared in all directions, including straight up.

It's difficult to describe just what I felt in those first moments. I was quite overwhelmed by the strange, wondrous new world that surrounded me. I'm not sure how long I stayed there, standing just on the edge of the ship, staring at the world around me. But what brought me back to reality was the sudden sound of the generators in the downed shuttle dying out with a low whine.

That's when I realized what I should have thought of as soon as I had stepped up to the hole in the hull. I had not, as the computers had been programmed to do, landed in the RDA compound at Hell's Gate.

I was alone.

And that scared me.

I spent the remainder of the daylight hours searching through and sorting the supplies on the shuttle. Research equipment was mostly ignored, with only some of the larger vials and specimen containers set aside for later. Rations were slim to none, with only emergency rat's having been stocked for the trip, and even then, I was not sure if my altered constitution could handle the calorie-rich paste. The techs in the lab had fed me a mix of traditional human foods and some genetically cloned Pandoran fruits, and I still wasn't sure just what I could and could not eat.

There were a handful of holdout weapons on board, mostly pistols that were too small for my altered fingers to fit through the trigger guards. I would later go on to file those off, but all that was available to me that night was a pair of rifles, just barely large enough to use. I did, however, use a pair of belts to fashion a makeshift bandolier, hanging the dozen combat knives I had found from it and instantly feeling a little better about my situation. First order of business tomorrow morning would be to fashion a spear or two out of either the knives or some of the metal shards of the wrecked shuttle.

I blocked off the opening in the hull with several of the steel footlockers, and spent most of that first night curled up in the corner of one of the storage closets, feeling insecure despite the twin layers of metal between me and the wilderness.

You might notice that I'm not really articulating how I felt about this whole thing, but I prefer not to expound on my hardships. I had been altered into an abomination of science, shot through space in cryo stasis, and crash landed, alone, on an alien planet that was notorious for its deadly inhabitants.

How do you think I felt?

I chose instead to focus on surviving. Carving out a niche for myself in the forest. Living as well as possible, in pure spite of those who would have abandoned me to death.

The second day was easier, in comparison. The first thing I did was dig out the solar power generator and batteries, setting them up and bolting them to the roof of what was now essentially my home. Before… Well, before Ascension, I had been a metalworker, working long, hard hours to save up money to put myself through schooling. I wanted to be a biologist. I was a bit of a history buff, too, but what I really wanted was to study life in all its forms. Particularly since the discovery of Pandora was only just before I was born. I had grown up seeing the magical land in space as the ultimate paradise, a way to escape from the drudgery of Earth. But being an orphaned child, living in poverty, I had no way of making that a reality.

Yes, I volunteered for Ascension. It had been a once in a lifetime chance to make enough money to go to school, all in one shot, for just a year of my time.

No, they never told me what they were actually testing. Figures.

But they did send me where I had wanted to go. Well, sort of.

Pandora was the ultimate paradise of life, especially for someone from a dead planet. Of course I had wanted to go.

Not like this though.

Never like this.

The panels were a bitch to handle by myself, but the promise of a self-sustaining power source was too much to let slip away, so I worked my mutant ass off to get them set up and solid. By the time I had finished, half the day had slipped away, and I had drained twice as much of the water that I had intended to from the shuttle's meagre stores.

But I would have power. And that, at least, made me smile.

I spent the rest of the day shoring up the hole in the wall of my new home with some of the larger scraps of metal that I could drag back from the broken path in the tree line and a portable arc welder. It was during this first small bit of exploration that I encountered my first signs of animal life on the moon.

They weren't much, but the sight of a pack of six-limbed blue monkeys would give anyone pause. The Prolemuris didn't even take notice of me, staring at them with an armful of metal and a dopey grin on my face. But watching them swing gracefully through the forest canopy was like a jolt of pure ecstasy through my tired mind.

This place was _alive_.

Earth was a noisy, crowded, dirty place, but here, on Pandora, there was an almost… Ethereal quiet to the air. Gone were the sounds of mass transit systems, the hum of air scrubbers, and the rabble of the masses of people. Here, there was only a whisper of wind through the trees, and the occasional sounds of the various life-forms I had only just begun to notice.

The blue-green monkey-like Prolemuris were but the first. Now, having realized what I had been missing, the whole forest came alive with every form of life I'd ever heard about. Great, spiny insects skittered about on the trees. In the canopy far above, small, winged creatures flickered in and out of view.

It was all too simple to loose myself in the riot of color and the quiet harmony of the jungle air.

But work needed to be done.

I had picked out a pair of long pieces of a flat bar out of the wreckage, but I wasn't planning to use them in the patch job. For whatever reason, an image of ancient blades of war stuck out in my mind, and I put them aside, my tired mind deciding that at least I would have something to do while I waited for daylight the next day.

I also found a small river, much to my relief. It was just beyond view of the crash site, but I could hear the running water while I was salvaging the scrap, and immediately dropped what I had been doing to investigate. The water was cool, and lacked the metallic tang I was used to.

At the time, though, it tasted like liquid electricity to me. Pure, clean, fresh water was a novelty that recharged my proverbial batteries like a bolt of lightning.

Night fell again, and I forced myself to suck back one of the emergency ration packs, finding that I could, in fact, keep it down. I spent a few hours staring at the two pieces of metal bar, one over six feet long, one just under four. I was reminded of the daisho of ancient Japan, and almost laughed at how lame that thought was.

Still, having a larger blade would help if I ever ran into any of the less pleasant creatures of the forest.

Or worse, the indigenous population.

The thought of how the Na'vi would react to my presence and form was both frightening and, at the same time, a curiosity that just _begged_ to be satisfied. But as I sat in the darkened ruins of the ship, listening to the unearthly quiet out in the forest, I knew it would not be good to test before I had become at least accustomed to my new surroundings.

I slept better that night. I guess knowing that I had, with my own hands, created some small enhancements to my shelter, was enough to set me better at ease.

The next day I welded a hand guard to each piece of metal, almost shaking my head at how stupid I was being. Here I was, fabricating a pair of swords, of all things, when I should be out foraging, or maybe even trying to hunt something for food.

But when the hand guards were on, I tore up one of the white and black leather pilot seats to make grips for the handles. And when I tested the feeling of the leather-wrapped steel in my hands, blunt though they still were, it made me feel just a little safer, so I suppose it was worth it in the end.

I spent the third day making myself more comfortable. I tore up the interior of the ship, removing chairs and tables from the floor, opening up a space to move around more. The emergency cots were picked apart and their metal repurposed to fashion a swinging door frame and locking bar, the fabric sections set aside till I could think of some way to use them.

I bathed in the river that day, revelling in the feeling of the cool water on my altered body. I took some… Ahem… Personal time, as well, but I kept it short, and returned to my task soon after, And by the end of the third day, I was both exhausted, and finally satisfied with the status of my shelter.

The normal quiet of this night was shattered by the sounds of violence out in the forest, somewhere close. Yelps and barks, and a deep, resonating roar that set my bones to shaking.

I slept with the rifles that night. Not that I'd ever fired one before, but knowing that I had a deadly weapon in my arms helped ease me into a restless sleep.

Though what good it would do me against a hungry Thanator was up for debate.

One can only read so much in books, though. The Thanator was supposedly Pandora's apex land predator, a huge jaguar-like creature that ruled under the canopy. And the next morning, as I ventured out to investigate the noise, either bravely or stupidly (take your pick), I was horrified by what I found, less than a few hundred yards out into the bush from the crash site.

The amount of blood on the ground was staggering. By the looks of things, the Thanator had found a nest of Viperwolves. Both animals were predators, but the larger species had clearly prevailed here. Half-eaten carcasses littered the area, and claw marks on the surrounding trees told of a great flight from the area, thankfully away from the crash site. The great beast had driven away the pack hunters, unknowingly making the area safer for me to live in.

Oh yay. My 'safe' little home was in the territory of a Thanator.

Lucky me.

But out of the gruesome site, came something that helped me more than anything else in those early days. A single, mewling whimper brought my attention to the base of a nearby tree. One tiny baby Viperwolf lay there amid the gore of what must have once been its family. The poor thing had a large gash on its rear leg, but the bleeding had stopped to a slow ooze by the time I found her. "Well hello, there." I said softly, watching her tiny dark eyes turn towards me.

I should point out that I had been talking to myself the whole first few days. None of it was pertinent, though. Mostly just rhetorical questions and describing what I was doing to myself. But the sound of my voice had been… A disturbance. It had kept me sane, sure, but it sounded wrong, the words not meshing with the surrounding environment at all.

Now, some people might call me crazy, taking in a wild animal when I couldn't realistically fend for myself. I wasn't really thinking about it at the time, but taking the poor thing in was one of the things that kept me sane those first several months.

Of course, it wasn't as easy as all that. Few if any animal species were kept as pets back on Earth, and I had never been able to afford the extravagant expense of owning one. What little I had read in books about domesticating animals was of great help, but when the creature snapped at me the first time I reached for it, I almost screamed. "Hey! Stop that! I'm trying to help!"

It took me a few minutes to find a piece of meat that wasn't caked in dirt or insects, but I offered it to the orphaned wolf, and, ever so slowly, she came out of her hole and took it from me, scampering away to devour the morsel, oblivious to the fact that she was eating the remains of one of her own kind.

She wouldn't leave her hole for a few hours though, even as I found some more meat for her to eat. It was almost sundown, and I had been staring off into the sky for a while, when I felt a feather light touch on my bare arm and flinched away from it, my head snapping down. The baby viperwolf skittered away at the sudden moment, conscious now of my eyes on her, but it only took her a moment to muster up the courage to approach me again.

"Well, look at you." She retreated again, limping on her bad leg, when I reached my hand out to her. "Come on now, don't be shy."

She sniffed my hand for a moment before a long tongue lolled out and licked it. "There you go… There's a good…" I leaned over to look. "Girl."

The puppy, as I affectionately came to refer to her, nuzzled up to me after another few tentative moments, and I was astonished at how trusting she was. She must have been almost literally a newborn to be so uncautious. Still, as I leaned down and picked her, squirming and yelping, into my arms, I was glad I'd found her.

Someone to keep me company on this strange new world.

She stopped squirming when I started petting her gently, being careful not to touch her wounded leg. As I walked us back to the crash site, she snuggled down into my arms and started to purr like a kitten, and I had to giggle at that. "Well now, aren't you adorable?" She looked up at me, her alien eyes bright in the mid afternoon sun. "Let's get you cleaned up, shall we?"

I took her (By the time I'd gotten home, I was reasonably sure she was, in fact, a 'her'.) back to the river and washed her up as gently as I could before returning to the crash site. A little spray of bio-foam to disinfect and seal the cut, and she snuggled into my lap and fell asleep, spent. And there we stayed for the rest of the day, napping and getting used to each other's presence.

A week passed. I fell into an easy routine of gathering water every morning, filling a number of large containers for both myself and my, at the time unnamed, new friend. She would trot along after me, limping only slightly on her rapidly healing leg, and jump and play freely among the short bushes. I had torn a thong of white leather out of one of the pilot's seats and tied it gently around her neck, marking her as mine more out of a feeling of possessiveness than anything else. She only chewed her way out of it twice before getting the hint and leaving it alone.

After the water run, we would tend to whatever needed doing at the camp, fixing up a stronger door, cleaning the solar panels of deadfall, checking the electrical connections. I spent a lot of time reading through whatever manuals I could find on the ships database, downloaded into a low-powered datapad. There was a wealth of information to be had, anything from improvised shelter and weapons to ancient stories from Earth's history.

What I was reading, though, was the NRD's field survival guide, and trying to puzzle out what I could apply to my own situation. "In times of desperate survival," I read aloud, "One must always maintain calm. Focus on the minutia of day to day tasks, lest such grandiose thoughts of rescue or peril drive one to drastic measures."

I dropped the data pad in disgust. "Well, that's really useful, isn't it?" I asked my new companion. The baby viperwolf looked up from the insect she was chewing on. "You know, I really should come up with a name for you, shouldn't I…" The pup gurgled happily as I reached down and scratched the smooth skin under her chin. "Hmm…"

The datapad was picked back up, and I loaded up the Na'vi translator program. It was a prototype, based on Dr. Grace Augustine's preliminary work with the indigenous population on Pandora. She had been on one of the first manned flights to Pandora, all those years ago, and her work had shaped the course of almost all of the developments on the moon world. It was her research that had pushed the Avatar program to its final selection over its competitors.

"Hmm… What to call you…?" The database of words was small, and many were too hard for me to pronounce. But I finally picked one. "'Tstew'. That is what you are. Brave."

Braver than me, at least…

Tstew cooed at me as we bunked down for the night. The gentle sound of her breathing as she slowly drifted off brought a modicum of peace over me.

It would be the last peaceful night for a long time.

* * *

A/N: The experiment continues. R&R, and Stay Frosty. -E. Red


End file.
